Last night the Financial Timesbroke news Jamie Dimon is willing to admit that maybe the Bear Stearns mortgage traders really did break securities laws and he should settle with the Securities & Exchange Commission. What the FT forgot to mention was I was the lone reporter in late January 2011 who reported JPM was under SEC investigation for this. A story I continued to report and warned on for the last two years at DealFlow Media and on RT’s top financial news show Keiser Report.

Most of my peers in the financial press have been afraid to report on this story. Even when JP Morgan admitted in their own 1st quarter filling this year that they’d received a wells notice –which means their regulator told them they are going to be sued if they don’t settle. Once again a series of my reporting on a financial institution committing fraud was proven right. The only thing I don’t know is how many millions the SEC will accept as settlement for these crimes against Bears own investors. The amount of dollars JPM pays the SEC isn’t that important though because the simple fact that they are willing to admit it wasn’t ok for Bear Stearns traders, under Tom Marano, to steal billions from their own clients gives the $100 billionish in civil rmbs fraud suits, filed by investors, a huge negotiating advantage.

The WSJ wrote today that people close to the SEC settlement talks told them the investigation was over, “whether Bear Stearns got compensation from lender for bad loans it had purchased to bundle into mortgage-backed securities, but then failed to pass that money on to investors by putting it into the trust managing the securities.” The WSJ actually learned about this when I first went on Max Keiser’s show last year, multiple times, and told his millions of viewers this is what the SEC was investigating. Then the WSJ read my story in May about JPM getting a Wells Notice.

A sad fact to the state of journalism in covering this story is Tom Marano, Mike Nierenberg, and Jeff Verschielser’s attorneys have done a good job of keeping their names out of the press. The day I broke my first story on the subject at The Atlantic we actually reported an update to the story that the SEC was investigating. That’s because I was able to confirm the SEC called people involved in the situation and started to interview them the day I reported the story. It ran for about 24 hrs and then I watched a pr man from Bank of America, where Nierenberg is head of mortgages, run interference with The Atlantic’s top editors and the SEC update was taken down. A pathetic reaction by the senior editors at The Atlantic.

Max Keiser at international TV network RT trusted my reporting and printed on his website the SEC was now investigating for all the illegal actions I’d just reported. Then my editors at DealFlow Media encouraged me to continue to report out the Bear Stearns traders story at their trade publication The Distressted Debt Report. Jody Shenn at Bloomberg copied some of my reporting on the subject but then dropped off the story. In fact it was really only me and a talented legal columnist at Retuers, Alison Frankel, who continued to report on the impact of the rmbs fraud litigation against JP Morgan.

Still we have no criminal charges filed against Tom Marano’s team and they keep beating motions to add them individually as defendants in civil litigation. I remember feeling a little shocked when I first called Mike Nierenberg’s pr people at BofA to tell them about all the dirty emails and whistleblower testimony I had showing how Mike and Jeff executed this fraud and Mike came back saying ‘I’m not worried about it’. Yep that’s the mindset of Wall Street’s top mortgage executives — it just a cost of doing business and the bank will have to pay for their sins.

JP Morgan was Bear Stearns clearing agent before they bought the bank in March 2008. That means they saw all the toxic rmbs Bear was selling – so I don’t buy the argument that it’s not fair for JP Morgan to pay for Bear’s bad boys. Remember JP Morgan had the chance to settle with the monolines who’d sued for only a little over one billion dollars when they bought Bear in 2008 but choose to rack up millions in legal cost for the last five years and fight these charges. Even after Bear had previously told the monolines ‘ok you kind of caught us’ so we’ll pay back what we stole at cost. Seriously read the Ambac complaint and you’ll see this spelled out. So Jamie Dimon crying wolf that he’s a victim of the US government forcing him to buy Bear Stearns is line of total BS and any reporter who prints that line is only writing pr statements for the nation’s largest bank. Why is it so hard for my peers in the financial press to admit these guys did something really really wrong?